For the past few years I've been watching a lot of Asian cinema. Long before "Lost in Translation" brought to mainstream America a "fresh" way of looking at Japan, I had been coveting Japan. This desire had to do with the films made there and the contemporary fiction written there. Haruki Murakami's novels, in particular, never failed to make me long for the edgy coolness of Japanese culture. This singular effect could be called many things, from "West fatigue" to "anxiety of clan." His books made me want to walk those streets, made me want in. I'm not alone. Murakami's stories have become a philosophical object of desire for his many followers and have transcended their cultish status to reach a wider audience than anyone could have imagined.

What invites such powerful longing? Murakami's previous novel, "Kafka on the Shore," gives an answer: In it, a 15-year-old boy, Kafka Tamura, runs away from home to escape his father's curse, only to walk into a labyrinth that could have been imagined by Jorge Luis Borges on LSD. The people could not be stranger: an old man who speaks cat language, a hooker who quotes French philosophers -- not to mention the presence of ghosts, magical stones, a haunted forest and characters with names such as Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders. It's amazing how Murakami manages to weave all this together without us walking away from a book John Updike called "an insistently metaphysical mind-bender."

"After Dark," Murakami's new short novel, beautifully translated by Jay Rubin, is not a mind-bender, but it is not a straight narrative, either. Nothing is simple in Murakami's world. His other short novels, such as "Sputnik Sweetheart" and "South of the Border, West of the Sun," are built as solidly as the complicated metaphorical machines that are his longer novels. Murakami's literary spiderwebs remind us that, though we may not be aware of it, something profoundly disturbing sits behind the mask of reality, that we are being stalked from its other side and that we are connected to our past the same way the ground under our feet is connected to the depths of the earth, through wells and tunnels.

"After Dark" takes place on a single night in Tokyo, where in the space of six hours and 56 minutes we follow the lives of a few bizarre characters. At a Denny's, a young woman who can't sleep meets the musician whose presence triggers the events to follow. At the same time, her sister, a Sleeping Beauty who two months before decided to go into the longest of sleeps, is watched by a camera-narrator hovering above her like a well-meaning voyeur. Then this fragile order of things gives way to horror: The first sister somehow becomes involved in the brutal beating of a young Chinese prostitute by a man who could be the exemplary dad next door; the TV in her sister's room comes to life like in a scene out of "Poltergeist" or "Ringu" and devours the sleeping girl, and the Tokyo night becomes no longer a haven for jazz musicians and wandering cats but a scenario to argue one of Murakami's dark philosophical premises: We all walk upon a ground we believe to be solid, but then something happens, the ground vanishes, and we are doomed to fall into that darkness.

I spoke of "West fatigue," yet it is important to underline that many aspects of Murakami's books, including this one, are West-friendly. His work is full of references to Western cultural icons, from Denny's to Burt Bacharach. If "Kafka on the Shore" compared archetypes and mythologies -- with Murakami placing Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex" in front of "The Tale of Genji" -- to explore human longing and desire, in "After Dark" Chinese gangsters meet "Love Story" to show the few degrees of separation between apparent normalcy and horror. If that seems like an absurd stew of references, well, that's classic Murakami -- an absurd stew that tastes good even if the ingredient list gives you pause.

"After Dark" is a bittersweet novel that will satisfy the most demanding literary taste. It is a sort of neo-noir flick set in half-empty diners, dark streets and hotel rooms straight out of the paintings of Edward Hopper. It reminds us that while great pleasures make this life worth living, great danger threatens the fictitious stability of our lives.

Like the work of the Chilean Roberto Bolaño or the Italian Roberto Calasso, Murakami's fiction reminds us the world is broad, that myths are universal -- and that while we sleep, the world out there is moving in mysterious and unpredictable ways.